My Book, One Year Later

It was just a year ago that I got my book from the distributor in the mail. There were a lot of things running through my mind as to what my next moves were going to be to promote Loonie to Toonie. When I first started writing my book, I was just more set on writing it really well and getting it done. I figured the rest would take care of itself once it was published.

So much has happened in the last year. After doing a lot of new things, I certainly learned a lot about myself. I figured out what I’m comfortable with and what I actually dread. I found myself leaning towards what I’m most passionate about, which is helping and educating people who are really excited about investing.

There are many components to writing and publishing a book. Would I do it again? Maybe. I dedicated a lot of hours figuring things out, so the next time around, it should be easier. I’ll share my journey and process, and hopefully, offer some insight to any budding authors out there.

The Writing Process: Ego vs. Audience

There is a huge amount of ego required to take on a huge project such as writing a book and seeing it to its completion. Your ego is what fuels your drive; this is not a bad thing – it’s actually necessary. Use it to feverishly brainstorm, explore your ideas, flesh out your concepts, and challenge what you’ve already come up with. At some point, your ego will have to step aside so that you can ask yourself objectively, “How can I write this better?”

To tighten up your work, you’ll have to consider your audience. Once you hook in your readers, what will it take for them to keep turning the pages? You need to find a way to consistently engage them. For me, this was a challenge because I prefer fiction. I’m a die-hard story-loving reader, and the last person you’d ever expect to be a stock trader. To write a book on finance was a complete departure from my personality. I realized that given my skills in stock picking and interest in writing, I had to somehow turn my non-fiction piece into my own art form.

I’d written long and short screenplays in the past, so I became more sensitive to voice, tone, and consistency. I absolutely love movies! However, because of my screenwriting experience, I can no longer watch them without breaking down theme, tone, voice, character, setting, pace, beats, cinematography, editing, soundtrack, etc. I tapped into this habit of analysis to get me out of my writing funk, which came and went after each writing attempt over the course of five years.

When I was beginning to write my book, all I could do was introduce each topic by talking about my own relationship with money and the experiences that turned things around for me. It was one self-centred page after the next. I feared that only some readers would appreciate my experiences while others would be thinking, “Okay, you too sucked at money management. Move on and tell me how I can make money.” There are a lot of great personal finance books out there, but many are inundated with anecdotes. If I wanted to write for the wider, more diverse audience of Canada, I needed to consider that not everyone will have the same cultural and generational references.

I felt I couldn’t do justice to the book I wanted to write, so I decided to quit. As a last-ditch effort, I re-wrote a stripped down version of my chapter on the economy. I liked its simplicity. Then I did the same thing for my section on money. I unexpectedly found the voice necessary to write for my intended audience: new investors who didn’t know where to start and didn’t have time to waste comparing financial lessons and life experiences.

The Writing Schedule

I was committed to writing and getting this book done ASAP. To free up my time, I re-focused my trade strategies on holding stocks for longer periods of time. This way, I wasn’t required to log on to the markets every day or watch them all day long.

I had my own office space for trading, but I felt I couldn’t write there. I created a special writing space in the corner of my bedroom. I arranged all my reference books so that they could be readily and easily accessed. I organized all my information and research into folders and I had a whole filing system going on. I became my own office assistant!

Given my drive to write and the number of hours I could dedicate outside my job of managing a neighbouring property, I figured I could write a chapter each week. I also had the huge hurdle of being self-conscious of writing something that the public will one day be reading. To get over it, I signed up for a free blog site on WordPress and I committed to blogging and publishing a chapter every Tuesday. I did this for a few months for the first half of the book. After that, I continued to write a chapter per week, only I didn’t blog them.

What I found good about blogging my work wasn’t just the regular schedule, but it also gave me a real sense of accountability for publishing information. The rush of putting out your work for your friends to see gave me a glimpse of what it would be like to have my blood, sweat, and tears made public and available to criticism. It exposed me to the vulnerability of being an author. It also made me realize the accountability that comes with misinformation. It would take me one to two days to blitz-write a chapter and the next five days fact-checking against the clock until blog day. I vigilantly challenged every sentence’s construction, every idea I thought was true, as well as the proper usage of financial terms (the semantics are often very different from regular English).

Getting Professional Assistance

I didn’t have the time nor the experience to figure out how to publish my book. I personally knew a lot of smart, creative people who wrote books, pitched publishers, and then…waited for their rejections. For me, my traditional publishing options were even fewer because I was writing non-fiction with a focus on personal finance. I’d be approaching publishers who already published books for celebrity financial planners and famous business tycoons. I also feared that a publisher wouldn’t dedicate much marketing efforts for an unknown author. I couldn’t risk any of those things. I knew what I wanted to be done for my book and I was the only person I could trust to do it. Plus, I wanted to keep all of my royalties. Self-publishing was the only way.

I looked around and found Tellwell Talent, based out of Victoria. Their website alone was so informative as it broke down the process of publishing on your own. On top of that, you got to keep all of your royalties. A lot of other self-publishing services take a cut of your royalties. You pay for Tellwell’s extensive services (ISBN, cover design, interior layout, editing, marketing and publicity consultation, distributing, etc.). Once you publish, you keep the money your book makes from sales after your distributor takes its cut for printing your book.

I was set up with a project manager (Hi, Erin!), who was the go-between me and the designer and editor. They were all so helpful and informative throughout the whole process. I’m sure I was no cakewalk to deal with either! While I was still writing my book, I worked with the designer for my cover until I was ready to give my draft for editing.

I often wondered if other authors felt the same way, but there were times when I felt utterly alone as I was writing. I had a lot of support from friends and my man, JP, along the way, but I felt alone in that no one really knew what I going through. Once I signed with Tellwell, I felt I had a team behind me and it made a world of a difference as I completed my book.

Getting Published – Finally!

Once I finished the book and signed off on everything, it was a matter of getting set up with the different distributors. I knew I wanted to have a print version of my book, as well as the eBook. You can have one or the other, but I wanted both. For the eBook, I published through Smashwords (who distributes your eBook title to a bunch of other eBook retailers), Amazon Kindle, and Kobo.

For my printed book, it would’ve been a bit more complicated if I distributed through both Amazon Publishing and IngramSpark. Amazon Publishing would have to give you a separate ISBN along with different loyalty agreements with you while taking a bigger POD (print-on-demand) cut. The main upside was that Amazon Publishing would’ve promoted my book through Amazon. I went with IngramSpark because with them, I was able to affordably print my book in the glossy cover with the weird dimensions that I wanted. (I’m not a Type A, but I really was when it came to my book’s format.)

Ingram could also distribute to most major retailers all over the world. This means if a retailer agrees to place your title in its bookstore, they could order easily through your book distributor. Most retailers have accounts with Ingram, so I felt like I picked the right one. With Ingram, I could still sell my book through Amazon as a retailer, just like anyone who has a product, so it made more sense for me to just have to market one book in print with one ISBN. Thankfully, Tellwell set it all up with the distributors and I (mostly) didn’t have to deal with the headache of all that.

The Most Difficult Part: Marketing My Book

I feel like this warrants a whole book to describe what I went through. This is where an author’s love for his/her book gets tested. I consulted extensively with Sandy, Tellwell’s ebullient marketing consultant. I couldn’t have had a nicer, more encouraging person shake me up with the biggest wake-up call ever. She didn’t just tell me what I had to do – she gave me a real sense of how competitive the book market actually is.

Under Sandy’s guidance, I created a very ambitious marketing plan; I learned later, it would’ve actually required two of me to execute everything. JP was so supportive of what I had to do and he was cool with letting me sidestep our life plans so that I could dedicate myself to getting my book out there.

Even though I’ve long since used up all of Tellwell’s publishing services that I paid for, we’re still in touch. We still email each other with questions or things we discovered that could help each other. I admire a business model that is always evolving. They’ve got a great blog going that informs new authors and features some of their own published authors (scroll down the blog and check me out!).

Your Author’s Platform

Not everyone will want to blog or maintain their own website. I found that if there’s one thing I love doing – out of all the things I’ve done to promote my book – it’s blogging. Blogging might not make sense for all authors or their books, but it’s probably the best way to engage with other readers and to work on your writing. I’ve been very lucky as I was approached by Investor’s Digest of Canada to publish columns for them. It’s a great process for me to be able to step away from blogging sometimes and write to a different audience of investors and industry professionals.

There is no shortage to the discussions surrounding personal finance and investing. I just love writing about money and exploring the different themes that are related to money. I realized that my commitment to the topic of finance goes beyond my book. If you’re a fiction author and into fiction, then you might want to blog about other books or movies in your genre.

If there was one thing I wish I’d done before writing my book, it would’ve been establishing my platform first on loonietotoonie.com. I couldn’t have foreseen the importance of this, but it would’ve been helpful to have been established this way first. I say this because as you pitch media, bookstores, and libraries, they need a place to check you out. If you already have a website with subscribers and your own following on social media, it’s easier for them to say yes to an interview or to carry your book.

Retailers

You should know where you want to see your book sold. “Everywhere” is the obvious answer. However, you’re not a publishing house with a long-standing reputation and established connections to the various retailers out there. Before you pitch anyone to carry your book, you should create your own Marketing and Publicity Plan for your book. Your strategy should outline what you’re going to do to generate buzz, win over readers, the selling points for you and your book, and your book’s information. You can find some good template examples of other authors’ marketing and publicity plans if you do a search on Google Images.

I used Word to create mine and I sent its PDF to a discount printer to print a bunch of glossy copies. I also designed a bookmark to print as well. If you have a good colour printer that will print well on glossy paper and cardboard, use that instead. Otherwise, print this stuff out in bulk.

One of the most recommended and realistic routes to getting your book in bookstores is to consign them. I didn’t do this because there are very few bookstores where I live in the countryside of Southern Ontario. It would be challenging for me to check in regularly to see how my sales are going or to supply new books. Most of my book sales are from online purchases and at Indigo bookstores in BC and Ontario.

If you want to know what is expected of you when you pitch a bookstore, visit Barnes and Noblesbecause they have excellent guidelines that will help you professionally approach your pitches. Some retailers are more explicit with what they expect of you than others. Once you have your Marketing and Publicity Plan, you can submit that or work off that to give bookstores what they’re looking for.

Libraries

I submitted my book to my library to carry as a title. After it was accepted, I asked the librarian on what I should do to get it out there. She recommended a few librarian distribution sites located in Ontario. I contacted these places and they agreed to list my book and its information.

I did for libraries what I did for bookstores. I made a list of 100 Canadian cities and contacted most of their major university and college bookstores (because my book is educational) and their city and regional libraries. Some libraries require very specific formats for title submissions, while others don’t. So check each library’s website to find their key contact people. Some libraries have title submission forms that you simply fill out online. For libraries without online forms, I did title submissions by email or letter mail (get stamp rolls from Costco to save on postage!) directed to their key contacts.

If you want to have a good idea of what kind of information you should provide when requesting a library to carry your book, then visit Toronto Public Library’s web pagethat explains their process well. If you do this, you’ll have ready at your fingertips what you’ll need for most other libraries’ title submission requirements.

TPL was actually one of the first libraries to accept my book and they bought 11 copies. They also contacted me and asked me to do a presentation as part of their Personal Finance Program Seriesthis summer! I’m super excited. People are already signing up months in advance, so if you’re going to be in the Toronto area on June 20th, book your spot now!

Other Marketing Moves

There is no end to the different ways to get people to hear about you. I’ve done radio and podcast interviews, had book giveaway contests, applied for book awards, did book signings, created podcasts and videos. I also tried out many strategies on social media.

After a year of marketing, I’m still plugging away at all this. The difference is, I’m now able to focus my energies using strategies that I most enjoy doing. Some things (like book signings) just made me flat out uncomfortable. Other authors will have a different experience. You might surprise yourself, but you won’t know until you try out different things.

Going Forward

Towards the end of last year, I stopped seeing myself as an author and more of a financial educator. (I think I missed my calling as a teacher out of fear of ending up with a student like me.) This shift was very subconscious. My stocks were doing very well, a lot better than my book sales! Rather than worry about boosting sales to make a career as an author, I just started to focus on what I was able to get done with the time that I actually had. I was getting nowhere worrying about what little time I had to do every little thing.

The best way for me to approach this was to prioritize doing the most important things first. I found that regardless of the things I set out to do, I ended up only doing the things I really wanted to do, which is to write and invest. I’m now showing readers who are ready to make money a lot more advanced stuff with stocks. I’m revealing my very own strategies that have made me money. I think it’s just a matter of time before most investors turn to stocks and ETFs, so I’m more than happy to be positioned early on where I am with a number of teaching tools readily available to anyone who wants to learn.

I hope more than anything that I can help people reach their financial goals. I still think it’s important that new investors read my book so they’re not left behind, so I still do a lot of marketing to put my book out there. If you already have my book and want to know where my head is at any given time, just read my blog.

Disclaimer

Investing involves varying degrees of risk. All content on this website is for information sharing purposes only. This information is not intended to replace the advice and services of licensed professionals. When making decisions on your finances, seek the assistance of competent professionals. The author of this site assumes no risk or responsibility for the investment decisions made by users and readers.